CULTURAL ITEMS AND SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE IN CHILDREN’S BOOKS WRITTEN BY INDONESIAN CHILD AUTHORS: A LURKING PITFALL

Dina Dyah Kusumayanti

Abstract

In the last decade, Indonesia is flooded by children’s books written by Indonesian child authors published nation widely. In the one hand, this situation is pinpointing significant era in the development and the history of children’s books in Indonesia, as this delineates the potential of Indonesian children’s creative writing. On the other hand, this coming flood of child books might bring a pitfall. This pitfall is presupposed to be hidden in the language used in the books. Myriad researches on these type of books have been conducted, but they do not touch the lurking symbolic violence offered by the books. The aim of this study is to find out some cultural items in the contents and languages in the sources of data which presupposes to relate to symbolic violence. Bourdieu’s theory (1977; 1984; 1989; 1990; 1991) on symbolic violence will be the underpinning tool to dissect the data in three books of Kecil-Kecil Punya Karya published by Dar! Mizan, one of Indonesian biggest publishers. Content analysis is chosen as the method of analysis. Provisional results show that proper names of characters, foods, music instruments found in the books may have provided symbolic violence both to the authors and the readers.

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